Baby Steps For Building Your WordPress Website

You’re ready to create your first website for your business. Before you can start building your site and adding content, there are a few technical steps you’ll need to take care of to get everything set up.

In this article, we’ll walk through the steps of setting up a WordPress website using Namecheap products.

Register a Domain

Where do you want your website to live? Registering a domain for your website is like choosing your street address.

Here are some things to consider when choosing a domain:

keep it short

make it memorable

be sure it’s easy to spell

ensure it accurately reflects your brand identity

If you already know what you want to use for your website address, you can register your domain on Namecheap.com now. If you’re not sure what to use, or if your first choice is already taken, we have some handy tips on how you can go about choosing your domain.

Set Up Hosting

Now that you have an address, you need a place for your website to live. While there are several different options for your hosting here on Namecheap, we’ll assume for this example you’re going to use Shared Hosting – a great place to start out for most websites, as it’s both economical and easy to use.

Purchase the service that best suits your needs, and keep an eye out for Namecheap emails with further information.

Connect Your Domain and Hosting

Once you have registered your domain and set up your hosting account, you’ll need to point that domain to your hosting platform. To accomplish this, you will assign your Namecheap nameservers to your domain. This is a lot like sending out a Change of Address card to let the post office know where to deliver your mail.

Updating your nameservers is a simple process that you can manage through your Namecheap Account Panel. We offer step-by step instructions on how to make this happen.

Accessing your cPanel

Once you have created your hosting account, you will receive an email with your personal cPanel web address (URL), username, and password. These are different from your Namecheap account username and password.

The cPanel is your dashboard for your hosting account. Here you can view your bandwidth and disk space usage, create subdomains, manage web email, use FTP to transfer files to and from your site, access databases, and install content management systems (like WordPress) or other software on your website.

Install WordPress using Softaculous

Now, it’s time to install your website foundation. WordPress is a great content management tool that allows you to build out your site and update content easily. You can use Softaculous to make installing it a snap. Here are a few steps you’ll want to follow:

Log into your cPanel and locate the Softaculous App Installer. You will see an option within Softaculous to install WordPress.

Assuming you want your URL to be “yourwebsite.com,” you can leave the In Directory field empty. (As we explain in our documentation on Softaculous, by default, this field is empty, and it allows installing WordPress for your main website.)

Set your WordPress username and password here. These should be different from your cPanel login or your Namecheap account. Be sure to write these down and keep them safe. You will need these credentials to log into WordPress when you’re done with this step.

Log into WordPress and Choose a Theme

Your house is built – congratulations! But it still needs decorating. Once you’ve installed WordPress, you can exit your cPanel and log into your WordPress site.Go to your site address (the address specified in “In Directory”) and add /wp-admin (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin).

(Note : if you just registered your domain and/or just connected it with Namecheap hosting, you may need to wait a bit for the domain name servers propagate. If you can’t see anything yet, don’t panic!)

When you are asked for your username and password, use the details you specified when you installed WordPress. If everything has been set up correctly, when you log in you should see your WordPress Dashboard.

Once you’re logged in, you can install a theme by navigating in your Dashboard to the left-hand column and choosing Appearance > Themes.

Build Your Site

This is where you get to add your furnishings. To learn WordPress and all of the options you have for your site, we recommend the WordPress Codex. The Codex contains all kinds of great information about WordPress and is maintained by volunteers of the WordPress Foundation.

In other Namecheap blog posts we’ll continue to highlight WordPress best practices and tips on improving security, choosing plugins and themes, and other topics. We encourage you to check out our previous posts on WordPress in our archives.

2 thoughts on “Baby Steps For Building Your WordPress Website”

Yes, if your site requires a password or the transfer of any other sensitive data like credit card information, you should invest in an SSL certificate for your site. These will encrypt the data as it goes from the user to the website. You can view the Namecheap SSL options here: https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates.aspx